To write this book, Prof. Quinn and I had to hand-transcribe over 100 000 entries from the Grootboeken (ledgers) of the WB. There is now however a project to digitize the entire grootboeken (over 10 million entries), being led by Lodewijk Petram of Huygens and others.
This project requires a modest amount of funding for its realization. I am hoping that Mr. Sleijpen and other leaders of Amsterdam’s financial community will come together to enable the digitization to move forward. Really these ledgers are a treasure for monetary historians. It would not be an exaggeration to call them “the TARGET2 of the 17th and 18th centuries.”
That's wonderful, thanks for the reference. That must have been quite the effort! Part of the reason for me to write is to become better informed, a friend also told me Adam Smith dedicated a large part of _The Wealth of Nations_ to describing the functioning of the Bank, just before it failed. So I should read that also.
The Amsterdam Archives have a page on the digitized documents of the Wisselbank: that may be your work?
The Stadsarchief Amsterdam has scanned many ledgers, which has been very helpful. However Lodewijk and his colleagues are trying to go a step further, to use OCR technology to convert scans of the grootboeken and related materials into data files (for example Excel) that could be used for research without hand transcription. This would be a revolutionary development in early modern monetary history.
I’m another admirer of the Wisselbank, which is why I wrote this book about it with Stephen Quinn
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/economics/macroeconomics-and-monetary-economics/how-ledger-became-central-bank-monetary-history-bank-amsterdam?format=HB&isbn=9781108484275
To write this book, Prof. Quinn and I had to hand-transcribe over 100 000 entries from the Grootboeken (ledgers) of the WB. There is now however a project to digitize the entire grootboeken (over 10 million entries), being led by Lodewijk Petram of Huygens and others.
This project requires a modest amount of funding for its realization. I am hoping that Mr. Sleijpen and other leaders of Amsterdam’s financial community will come together to enable the digitization to move forward. Really these ledgers are a treasure for monetary historians. It would not be an exaggeration to call them “the TARGET2 of the 17th and 18th centuries.”
That's wonderful, thanks for the reference. That must have been quite the effort! Part of the reason for me to write is to become better informed, a friend also told me Adam Smith dedicated a large part of _The Wealth of Nations_ to describing the functioning of the Bank, just before it failed. So I should read that also.
The Amsterdam Archives have a page on the digitized documents of the Wisselbank: that may be your work?
https://archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/details/5077
On examination it seems to be internal documents and not their ledgers, that may have to wait for Lodewijk Petram's work.
The Stadsarchief Amsterdam has scanned many ledgers, which has been very helpful. However Lodewijk and his colleagues are trying to go a step further, to use OCR technology to convert scans of the grootboeken and related materials into data files (for example Excel) that could be used for research without hand transcription. This would be a revolutionary development in early modern monetary history.
Financial and history lesson rolled into one.........love it.